/jp/ - Otaku Culture

I played the arcade for a while in 2007, when still was popular but most people jumped to play the newly released XBox version.

First you needed to buy a Producer Card and an Idol Card. Some shops had special events including cards with limited art with an extra "collect them all" metagame.

It was different from shop to shop, but the usual price was 500 yen/3 plays and later 100 yen/1 play. In 2007 it was not so hot to limit the number of plays per user, but usually the limit was 3 plays before giving your place to another user.

If you played the first iM@S game you'll note that there's no story per se. You'll intereact with your idol in the Communication events, getting progressively more familiar with you as her rank goes up. The game also e-mails you in name of your produced girl. Not an in-game e-mail but your physical phone, saying stuff like todays she feels great to do an audition, a lesson or whatever, or asking why you are not producing her lately. This made a bound similar to Love Plus, "forcing" you to play.

Unlike the console versions that have a 54 week cap, in the arcade you can play until you can't reach the next idol rank in the time limit. The game stops around week 64 for a top rank S idol, but is quite difficult to achieve since you are playing against human players most of the time (you play against the CPU if there's not enough humans players playing at the same time as you). It had a top 100 ranking of players displayed in special tv stands as well.

The original essence was mostly lost in the following games, but you really develop an emotional attachment to the game, borderline addiction.

>>13741623
The game was aiming for realistic colors at first. Note that originally all the girls have only different tones of black and brown for hair and a yellow-ish tone for the skin. Now are color coded to differenciate them easily.